


procedurals

by ghost_lingering



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-25
Updated: 2009-02-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 20:51:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_lingering/pseuds/ghost_lingering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's not an FBI agent; she just plays one on TV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	procedurals

**Author's Note:**

> This could be meta fic, but it's mostly not, though I am absurdly pleased with a certain name. I crack myself up sometimes. Real spoilers for 1.18, and spoilers in a fake meta-ish sense for the rest of the series. Re: pairings: none, though if you squint really really hard, it might, it just might, be kind of sort of Reid/Lila-ish, but not really. Lj user equals mordororbust did beta duty.

After the stalking, she quit _Emotional Cages_ and got a role as the lead (and only) female character on a short-lived sitcom about quantum physicists. The show was hailed as quirky and fresh by television critics, hated by (some) physicists and feminists, and ignored by most everyone else. She did a few movies--the best friend in a romantic comedy, the lead in a Sundance film, and then came the pilot script for _Victimology_.

"I want to be in this show," she told her agent over the phone as she was driving down Wilshire.

"It's a procedural, honey," her agent said, "You're too good to be stuck going through the motions on _Law &amp; Order_ your whole life."

But she couldn't let it go. It wasn't like _CSI_ or any other procedural: it was funny, and hopeful, and it asked hard questions and the victims weren't the victims and the killers weren't the ones with the power and when she went to the audition that she begged her agent to get her she got through the FBI jargon without tripping and then did a scene with the character (_her_ character, she prayed) talking to a victim-almost-turned-vigilante where she said:

"On one of my first cases when I joined the BAU, another agent and I got stuck in a hostage situation, and the unsub--angry and trapped--was going to start shooting hostages, one by one. And he shot the first one, right there, with the blood splattering onto us. He knew that we were FBI, and he taunted us that we couldn't stop him from shooting the next one. But I always carry my grandfather's pocketknife with me, and he had only taken our guns. And so I managed to cut myself free and coax him close to me and I stabbed him in the neck. He bled to death before the ambulance arrived.

"And, you know what, there isn't a day that goes by when I don't see the way his eyes looked when I sunk the knife in. I see photographs of women and men and children, beaten and raped and tortured and killed, and the thing that still haunts me the most are his eyes, because he might have been a monster, but when he was dying in my arms I saw a man."

When she was finished, the casting director looked pleased and then nodded. "We'll get back to you," he said, and she smiled, a little, and picked up her bag and left. She felt odd and shivery and when she got home she stood by the pool and thought about jumping in.

A week later, she got the part.

The show's first season was good--solid ratings and scripts, but the second season was magic. She started getting recognized more on the street and had offers for movies shooting over the break. She loved it, loved working with the people, who were, by far, the best cast and crew she'd ever worked with. They were relaxed, but focused and they didn't take themselves too seriously. _Generous_, was the word she used to describe them in interviews, but that didn't nearly capture how Neil would blow on her hair to get her to laugh when she tensed up over the crime photos, or how Lizzy would flirt with her, outrageously, their giddy banter even making it into the scripts, or how Eliot would stand and give lines off camera even if he was already done for the day.

It was nearly four years after her own brush with profiling and she had gotten used to questions about the stalking. Everyone asked them: "What was it like?" "Was the girl really crazy?" "How did you get over it?" She answered them the same way each time and she didn't understand why people kept asking if all she gave were the same answers: "I was scared, of course" and "She is sick, but not evil" and "I live day by day." She was well practiced at talking about Mags, and her voice no longer broke as she tripped over her answers. Now, however, there were new questions: "Did the stalking have anything to do with your decision to work on _Victimology_?" "Did your interactions with the FBI color your acting?" Those were easier to answer ("No, I choose it because it was an amazing script, a really different kind of procedural" and "In some ways--I got to see how serious they were about their jobs and how dedicated they were, not just at finding the criminal, but at protecting the victims"), if only because no one had yet made the connection between the one photograph of her with a tall, slightly awkward, man holding her shoulder and her brief interaction with the FBI.

She had taken to reading as much as she could about profiling--Max Ryan's books, David Rossi's. She read articles by Jason Gideon, even watched the few taped talks he had given. She studied the cases that Aaron Hotchner had argued when he was a DA, and she followed Jennifer Jareau's, and, briefly, Jordan Todd's, press conferences. And, of course, she followed Dr. Spencer Reid. She read everything of Spencer's, from his Caltech dissertation ("Identifying Non-obvious relationship factors using cluster weighted modeling and geographic regression.") on, essentially, maps, to the news articles in the local papers where there were cases. When asked by her co-workers, she said that she was doing research, but the truth was she'd been following Spencer's career ever since they had said goodbye, and then never called. She was following it more closely now, true--actually trying to understand his more academic articles and papers--but she'd always kept the clippings from the newspapers, tracked him on google news feeds. It wasn't creepy, she told herself, though in her darker moments she flashed to Mags and wondered if this was how it started, the stalking. It was always late at night, when she wondered that, usually after she'd come back from yet another terrible date. Her solution was to wrap herself in her bathrobe, make a cup of tea, and flip through channels to watch old _Star Trek_ reruns. As she would watch Kirk extol the virtues of exploration she would tell herself two things: one, she was only reading public information about Spencer, information anyone could find; and two, he could, just as easily, if not more, do the same kind of tracking on her. She hoped he did, actually, because that would mean that he hadn't just been doing his job, and that she had been more than some case. She liked to imagine him, sitting in a hotel room, taking a break from a hard case, and turning on the television to find an old episode of _Emotional Cages_ or maybe one of her movies. She liked to imagine him taping _Victimology_ if he wasn't home and watching it, later, laughing at the mistakes they made. Anyway, it's what she hoped.

During the third season there was some casting upheaval, nothing the show couldn't handle, but it was a shame anyway. She worried about it, for all of three weeks, before she met the new actors and knew they'd get on just fine. Neil played some joke with shaving cream and paint on the new girl--Gina--who just laughed it off and got him back in a way that somehow involved Jell-O and a cardboard cutout of Ronald Reagan. Neil was alternatively shamed he was outdone, and manic and gleeful that he had a new prankster friend. They teamed up against Joel and Lizzy, while Eliot and Lila tried to hide as best they could from them, with limited success.

The third season also gave her the chance at a two-part back-story episode, which she dug into with relish. Her character was taken hostage by an unsub, raped and drugged with amphetamines, then dragged on a devilish cross-country road trip with her captor. As her character flashed in an out of consciousness and attempted to leave, as it were, a bread-crumb trail for her team to follow, there were drug induced flashbacks to her childhood where it was revealed that she grew up raising her younger brother, as her single mother fell further and further into her chemical addictions. The second episode ended on her character, finally at home and safe, sitting in a bathtub, arms wrapped around her knees, as the shower rained over her head. The final quote of the episode was from _The Faerie Queene_ and while she didn't know the context, the words stuck with her: _Ay me, how many perils doe enfold//The righteous man, to make him daily fall._

The third season was also notable because she started dating someone. She was shocked, actually. His name was Ed and he was a writer on the show. He was tall and geeky, well spoken, with an absurd amount of self-confidence, something that she always ribbed him about, telling him he needed to be knocked down a peg or two. They had become good friends over the course of three seasons, but she never expected that they would start seeing each other. It's just that they lived close together and sometimes drove together to work. When he was having trouble on a script he'd come over to her house and swim in the pool, and sometimes he'd stay over and they'd talk about art and the east coast and all the stupid things they did as children.

He got her a Robin Hood-esque bow and arrow for Christmas, claiming that she'd be a natural with a last name like that, and she retaliated by getting him a signed copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which he had told her once was the bane of his childhood: "Everyone always asked me if I had been to Narnia," he'd said, long-suffering, "and if _I_ would have given up Christmas for some Turkish Delights and a creepy lady in a sled."

She supposed, when they ended up kissing each other at midnight on New Year's, it should have been less of a surprise than it was--things had been building for a while.

She had a picture--the picture--of her and Spencer taped to her mirror in her trailer and at the beginning of each day of shooting she kissed her fingers and brushed the page and whispered, "Thank you." When Ed saw it the first time, back, years ago, when the show was just starting, he'd asked her who it was. "Your boyfriend?" he'd wondered, then, cocking his head, "Your brother?"

She'd laughed at him, and hadn't answered.

In the most recent interviews for the show, promoting its fourth season, reporters asked her what it was like dating one of the writers. "We're used to being colleagues on the show," she replied, "and that hasn't changed--we both have a job to do and it's important to us to do it right."

They also asked her about the end of the third season and the episode in which she was raped and the subsequent fallout. She said only that it was a challenging experience--the hardest and most rewarding series of episodes so far in her career.

And, then one reporter asked: "Your acting on this show is so inspired--not that your previous work was bad, but this is worlds apart, and it's definitely heads above the acting on other procedurals. What's the secret?"

She smiled, slightly, pleased at the question, even if it was a backhanded insult. "Well," she replied, "I guess I have one hell of a muse."

"A muse? Who is it?" the reporter pressed.

"He's tall," she said, "and geeky, and he knows more about profiling than anyone I've ever met."

And when the reporter used that to segue into asking about her relationship with writer Edmund Wright, she gave another small smile and let them think that it was their victory, let them think that they got something new and personal about her relationship with Ed, when he hadn't actually been the answer at all.


End file.
